Elaeis guineensis

The oil palm, also known as the African oil palm or macaw-fat, is the main source of palm oil. Its scientific name, Elaeis guineensis, comes from the historical region of Guinea, not the modern country. This palm is native to a stretch of West and Southwest Africa running from Angola up to The Gambia. The species was first formally described by Carl Linnaeus in 1763, based on earlier collections; the French naturalist Michel Adanson is not credited with the first documentation or seed transport.

The plant has since spread beyond its native range and now grows wild in places like Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Central America, Cambodia, the West Indies, and several islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Two other palms—the closely related American oil palm (E. oleifera) and the more distant Attalea maripa—are also used for palm oil production.

Domestication of E. guineensis happened along West Africa’s south-facing Atlantic coast, but when exactly is unknown; as of 2019, there simply isn’t enough research or documentation to even guess. Human use of oil palms might go back 5,000 years in Egypt. In the late 1800s, archaeologists found oil in a tomb at Abydos dating to 3000 BCE that has sometimes been suggested to be palm oil, but the identification is disputed and not confirmed by mainstream archaeological consensus—it could be date oil or even animal fat, so the finding needs more investigation.

Description

Oil palms are remarkably efficient: they produce about nine times more oil per unit of land than soybeans and 4.5 times more than rapeseed. A mature palm is a single-stemmed monocot that can reach 20 meters (66 feet) tall.

Its pinnate leaves grow 3–5 meters (10–16.5 feet) long. Young palms put out about 30 leaves each year, while those over ten years old produce around 20 leaves annually. The flowers are small and grow in dense clusters, each with three sepals and three petals.

The fruit takes five to six months to go from pollination to ripeness. It’s reddish, about the size of a large plum, and grows in heavy bunches. Each fruit has an oily outer layer (the pericarp) and a single seed (the palm kernel), which is also rich in oil. A ripe bunch weighs between 5 and 30 kg (11 to 66 pounds), depending on the tree’s age.

Planting

For every hectare of oil palm harvested year-round, the annual yield averages 20 tonnes of fruit.